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We can all agree that data brokers are shameful and bad, and these days they eat more of our personal information than ever before. It’s hard to opt out — that’s why Opti is here to help — but as the data economy grows, we may need a more proactive management platform to stay on top of it — which Opti is hoping to build.
I met Optery founder and CEO Lawrence Gentilello playing on our demo stage at Riot last September. Short presentations have always been a hit, and I wanted to learn more about how opt-out assistants such as DeleteMe and PrivacyBee got the ball rolling in Optry’s case. Then I forgot (there’s a lot of confusion) and thankfully they reminded me that they were going to add $2.7 million to the seed fund.
If you don’t know, these are dozens – or even hundreds – of data brokers, companies that store any data they find about you and sell it to whoever wants it. Removing yourself and your data from them is often an exercise in frustration (though Yale’s list is the best if you want to try), so these companies offer opt-outs as a service, usually in freemium form.
Optery is no different there: you sign up for free and after an hour or two you get a report that brokers have found your data. This report includes in-depth links and instructions on how to opt-out, as well as screenshots. The information itself so they know what they have. I tried it and it caught about 50 more things than I deleted with DeleteMe.
You can then pay a monthly or annual fee to have Optery automatically select you and then stay active and select your data as it appears there. It seemed to work great for me and the experience was solid – PCMag has a full review and comparison if you want to know how it stacks up.
When I met with Gentilello, he explained to me that the arms race between consumers and data brokers favors the latter. There are many of them – hundreds, with many popping up regularly – and their opt-out rules vary widely in functionality and effectiveness.
“Dishonest people will take advantage of any opportunity to add you. If you don’t live in a state with privacy laws, you really don’t have the right to opt out, which is really sad and crazy these days,” he said. “When we started a year and a half ago, we covered 150 sites; now we cover about 240. If you had stopped, we would have lost like a hundred sites. So if you want to continue, the ongoing maintenance model is very important.
While not everyone wants or needs this, it’s important for consumers to have a powerful option or two at their fingertips. “In those situations, the victims live in fear, trying to destroy any evidence of where they’ve gone,” Gentilello explained, noting that shortly before speaking with me, he had met with a non-profit organization for victims of domestic violence. It’s a safety issue for them.
The company took a technology-first approach by creating a proprietary internal search engine that evades data brokers’ anti-bot systems and captures data that Google and other big engines try to keep at bay. That allows them to find more and provide before and after screenshots of proof.
Optary Founding Team. Image Credits: Optional
But Gentilello said this is the first step in what he believes could be an important new category of services.
“What we’re building is more than just removing your address and phone number from the Internet – it’s a data rights management platform,” he said. “With the rise of AIA and the huge demand for data and companies being able to get their hands on any data… it doesn’t have to be like this in the future. Consumers need a platform to decide what data these companies can and cannot use. They have to say to companies, ‘I want to tell you what you can and can’t do with the data you have on me, and I own the copyright.’ “
To move to that future platform, Optery has now raised $2.7 million in new seed funding, bringing its total investment to $6 million. “This is empowering us to build the team and this data management platform,” Gentilello said. The round was led by Bayhouse Capital, with participation from Global Founders Capital, Goodwater Capital, Pioneer Fund, Soma Capital, TRAC, Y Combinator and others.
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